The Industry expertise of sell-side equity analysts

• Main Author: DEARTH, Matthew Louis
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Sell-side analysts; Industry expertise; Key performance indicators; KPIs; Finance; Finance and Financial Management
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/391; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1389/viewcontent/Dissertation___Dearth_v4.8.2_postdefense.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Institutional investors, the most important consumer of analyst research, consistently rank industry knowledge as the most important attribute of analysts. Despite this, little is known about how investors measure industry knowledge since analyst output which can be evaluated objectively is usually associated with firm-level outcomes such as earnings forecasts or price targets. Comprehensive data are recently available for analyst forecasts of key performance indicators (“KPIs”), firm-performance metrics specific to a particular industry. Whereas reactions to earnings forecasts and other firm-level outputs only inform us about analyst skill in firm-level predictions, stock-price reactions to forecast revisions of industryspecific KPIs can proxy for industry-specific expertise of sell-side analysts. I find that stockprice reactions to KPI forecast revisions are economically meaningful and statistically significant, even when accounting for contemporaneous stock recommendation changes and earnings forecast revisions. These reactions are stronger for KPI forecast revisions that jump over the prior consensus, and for same-store sales forecast revisions on retail stocks.